Walk.
A simple word.
You can walk to the store, walk through the park; Wherever you want to go, there your feet are to take you there. Simple.
Walking with God isn’t always as easy. Sometimes, you need a little nudge to get out the door and by the time you stop fighting that push, you find yourself walking with God wondering why you made it so hard in the first place.
Here are another two words:
Be still.
A bit of a contrast to the previous word, yet they work together in ways you might not always imagine.
This whole year involves us walking. Yes, walking to a local market, or perhaps to a close ministry site that you’ll be working at for the next few hours. But it also involves a lot of walking with God. In turn, this year also means we have to be still with God at times.
Take yesterday, for example. We didn’t have any work with our usual ministry contact, so our team leader, Karlie, came up with an interesting idea: having a Spirit-led day.
What this meant was that we would pray for God to give us faces or some kind of detail to look for while we went out and walked around, finding where he would lead us. We came up with a list of many different people with different details and features that we believed God had given us and we journeyed out.
It was like we were in the Lord of the Rings—hobbits going out to accomplish what some might consider an odd adventure. That’s how walking with God can be at times. You don’t know exactly what the adventure will hold for you, but you know there is something to be achieved and you go for it.
We came across a number of people, and even as we were walking in the general direction we knew we had to go, God led us in another direction—a necessary detour for us to step out in obedience.
Along this new route God gave us, we continued forward, wondering what we were supposed to do on this new road. We ended up praying over quite a few houses that seemed dark.
A detail to know about Belize is that everyone has a guard dog or two.
Karlie had, at some point, prayed that the dogs from houses that had Jesus or weren’t ‘dark’, the dogs would remain silent. And for the houses that were dark, the dogs would just go crazy and bark. We did it for every house where the dogs barked.
Eventually, we did come up to a house that seemed abandoned, but another girl from our team, Hailey, felt that God wanted this house to be prayed over. We did.
My prayer ended up finishing before the others, so I was waiting for us to get ready to continue to walk where God wanted us to go next. Then, the words “Be still” came to mind, and I stood still.
That’s when an uncomfortable feeling crept up my spine, like when you’re a little kid and there’s that monster under the bed.
So I turned.
A white truck with a blue (that means it’s a government vehicle) license plate passed by. The driver was obviously alone to anyone who would look, but there was that nagging feeling that he wasn’t alone. Since I couldn’t exactly chase down this truck to pray for the guy, I turned my whole body to face this truck quickly getting smaller and smaller as it moved further into the distance. I stayed still and prayed over that driver in the white truck with the blue license plate. And I continued to pray until everyone else was finished and we could continue walking.
That was my day yesterday. Completely Spirit-led as God worked in ways that my team and I couldn’t possibly see or fully understand quite yet.
Walk and be still.
